On the Cover

March-April 2015Volume 103, Number 2

Nomadic army ants (Eciton burchelli), such as these individuals from a captive colony at the California Academy of Sciences, form living bridges with their bodies to cross gaps along their foraging trails. All ant trails are marked by species-specific pheromones, although their chemical composition remains unknown for most of the world’s 20,000 or more ant species...

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Cosmic rays have mysterious qualities about them that scientists continue to research in order to better understand their origins and composition. Dr. Eun-Suk Seo, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, and her colleagues, fly enormous balloons as large as a football stadium and a volume of 40-million-cubic feet for extended periods over Antarctica to study particles coming from cosmic rays before they break up in the atmosphere.

Regulatory DNA Variants in Disease: Too Much (or Too Little) of a Good Thing
By Brian J. Abraham
Decades of research into genetic disorders have scrutinized but a tiny part of the human genome—the part with the code for making proteins. This tiny part yielded the causes of sickle-cell disease and hemophilia and inspired a slew of labs to seek causes for more diseases in protein-coding DNA. But those labs’ quests returned surprising results.